Naked Cruelty Read online

“Yes, you can,” said Delia, “provided you put yourself under my authority and do exactly as you’re told. Will you?”

  “Yes, of course,” Helen said, face lighting up.

  “Good. I suspect we’re going to meet a number of the Dodo’s victims, and it’s vital that women comprise the front face of the investigation. Ever since their individual attacks, these young women can’t cope with men, no matter how sympathetic. You and I, Helen, have to do all the victim contact until we can persuade them to seek help from Dr. Liz Meyers at the rape clinic. That means we spend as much time as we can this afternoon coaching you in how to behave—it’s a matter of technique as well as feminine bonding. I’m hoping to be taking calls tomorrow after Mighty Mike’s breakfast show, but it’s possible we’ll have some responses after Luke Corby. You’re my shadow, Helen—wherever I go, you go. Understood?”

  “Yes!” said Helen fervently. It was here at last, her first case, and she was going to make sure that Delia shone. Because if Delia shone, so did she.

  Carmine took himself off to Carew and the eighth floor of Talisman Towers, the only ritzy block of high rise apartments in a district chiefly famous for its peace, prettiness, and hordes of women students at all levels of a tertiary education. Helen had explained that Mark worked from home, so Carmine fully expected to find him in his apartment.

  “Like Helen, I own my condo,” Mark Sugarman said, leading the way into a big room that had been intended as the living room, but had been turned into a studio. He indicated two hard chairs at a table, and went to the kitchen area to fetch mugs and a coffee pot, then sugar and cream.

  In all visual respects he was a large-yet-medium man, from his height of just under six feet to his face and coloring. What saved him from obscurity were his eyes: long-lashed, widely open, and a vivid green. He was wearing baggy, faded jeans and a short-sleeved shirt whose two breast pockets bulged with items including pencils, cigarettes, a short steel ruler.

  If typical artists are supposed to live in extreme disorder, he was not typical, for the room was immaculately kept; it was painted white and its natural lighting consisted of a whole wall of glass panes looking over the treetops toward Long Island Sound, dreamily blue in this lovely start to Indian summer. Rather than an easel, he worked on a drafting board, in front of which sat a bar stool. A tall table to either side held inks, pens, pencils, an electric pencil sharpener, various protractors and T-squares, a neat pile of rags, and a jar of water. As they passed the board, Carmine was amused to see that it held a black-and-white Indian ink drawing of a wacky-looking family of raccoons. It was very well done, its human element only subtly—but tellingly—suggested.

  “I’m a book illustrator,” Sugarman explained, pouring the coffee. “This one’s aimed at a general market from teens to nineties, so the publisher wants classy drawings—no cheating with cross-hatching or other short cuts. Therefore, hire Mark Sugarman. Few art schools teach classical ink drawing, so I’m in demand. I learned in London and Antwerp.”

  “How long has the neighborhood watch been in existence?” Carmine asked, adding cream and sugar; the coffee was old. “I should tell you that Maggie Drummond was raped last night, and wasn’t frightened enough not to call us. Her rape was atrocious—particularly brutal and demeaning—but I come from her with a request that you tell me everything you know. Maggie is very emphatic. She wants this monster caught.”

  The unusual emerald eyes had widened and shone with tears; Sugarman’s coffee slopped. “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Time to spill the beans about the Gentleman Walkers, sir.”

  “And that’s a relief, Captain.” He drew a breath, reached out automatically for a stack of paper napkins and wiped up his spill. “The first one we knew about was Leonie—my dear, sweet Leonie! I found her when I went up to see if she felt like a walk to blow the cobwebs away. She was—oh, a terrible mess! Not cut up or anything, but bruised and soiled. He’d raped her three times, once real pervert stuff. I wanted to call you, but she wouldn’t let me, swore she’d deny the whole thing. Babbling about her family in France, the disgrace.” He ground his teeth. “Nothing I could say would persuade her to change her mind.”

  “Did you believe Leonie was the first victim?”

  “I did, but Mason Novak—he’s my best pal—said his girl, Shirley Constable, had behaved so like Leonie that he was having suspicions that had never occurred to him before—he thought Shirley had had a nervous breakdown over her work, even though she loved it. After Leonie, he was convinced she’d been raped, but he can’t even get into the same room with her, so—who knows?”

  Carmine put his coffee down. “Mr. Sugarman, even if the women refused to co-operate, you should have brought your suspicions to the police, not organized a neighborhood watch.”

  “l see that now, Captain, but at the time neither Mason nor I did. I put an ad in the Holloman Post announcing that I was forming a walking club—Carew residents only need apply. And I was inundated with walkers! The Gentleman Walkers were an instant success.”

  “Without further stimulus than the rape of Leonie Coustain, which I presume you didn’t mention? That sounds peculiar, sir.”

  Sugarman laughed, a wry sound. “Vanity, Captain. We’d found a way to keep fit—walking. Most walkers give it up because of the loneliness, while we walk in trios, always the same three men—we vary the routes. Guys sorted themselves out into trios of like mind, if you know what I mean. And a man walks each second evening, not every single day. It’s enough to keep the waistline trim and the heart in good shape.”

  “And no Gentleman Walker has ever encountered a man who might be a rapist?” Carmine asked.

  “Definitely not. The closest we came were the peeping Toms.”

  “You did a real service there, anyway. Peeping Toms who are never caught often become rapists later.” Carmine cleared his throat. “I need a list of your members, Mr. Sugarman.”

  He rose from his chair at once. “Sure, I’ll get it. I have full details of every Gentleman Walker, it’s one of the club’s strictest conditions.”

  Carmine conned the beautifully typed list in some awe. Names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, occupations, days rostered to walk: a painstaking and lucid timetable as well as a list. There were schoolteachers, an occasional physicist, chemists, tradesmen, medical doctors, dentists, plant physical workers, city clerks, technicians, biologists—146 names altogether, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty-eight.

  “You must be a very persuasive recruitment officer.”

  Sugarman laughed, disclaiming. “No, I’m the logistics man, not the demagogue. You want to talk to Mason Novak. He’s the soul of the Gentleman Walkers, the one who keeps us inspired—and the one who took over from me as the ultimate authority.”

  Carmine found him on the list. “Mason Novak, aged thirty-five, analytical chemist with Chubb. Burke Biology Tower, or Susskind Science Tower?”

  “Susskind Science. He’s inorganic, he says.”

  “Do you have a meeting venue?”

  “Mason requisitions a small lecture theater in Susskind.”

  “Um—today is Wednesday, so … Friday, six o’clock?”

  “For what?” Mark Sugarman asked.

  “Oh, come, Mr. Sugarman! A meeting between the Walkers and Holloman detectives. On Friday, September 27. Call the meeting and emphasize that every Gentleman Walker is to attend. Okay?”

  “Certainly.”

  “It won’t be difficult to assemble your troops. Listen to Mighty Mike’s breakfast program. I predict that all the Walkers will be agog to discover what’s happened.”

  Funny, thought Carmine as his beloved Ford Fairlane headed for home that evening, how troubles never come singly. I have to turn Helen MacIntosh into a first-rate detective when I’m not even sure she’ll obey orders; I have Corey Marshall failing to make the grade as a lieutenant—who could ever have predicted that? Today I
learned that our prettiest, most tranquil suburb, Carew, is harboring a particularly dangerous rapist. And my fantastic, six-foot-three wife has been defeated by a twenty-two-month-old child. Desdemona! Twice she’s come face to face with killers and won the encounters, whereas a bullying, shouting, hectoring toddler has worn her down to utter defeat. My Desdemona, always hovering on the verge of tears. It doesn’t bear thinking of, yet it has to be thought of. Not merely thought of: it has to be dealt with, and fast. Otherwise I might lose my wife forever.

  He parked the Fairlane in the four-car garage’s only free bay and trod down the sloping path to his front door, aware that his couple of visits after work had made him later than probably Desdemona needed. The house, a very big New England colonial with a square three-storey tower and widow’s walk, stood halfway down two acres that backed on to Holloman Harbor; they had lived in it now for over two years and loved its every mood, from an idyllic summer’s day to the wildest storm to encrustations of ice in a hard winter. But the spirit of the house resided in its mistress, Desdemona, and she was failing.

  Nothing he could say had talked her out of a second pregnancy soon after her first; Julian was only sixteen months old when Alex was born. The boys were true fusions of nobly proportioned parents: from Carmine they inherited muscular bulk and a regal presence; from Desdemona they got bones that promised basketball players; and from both they took a high degree of intelligence that boded ill for parental tranquillity. If Julian was already so hard to take, what would it be like when Alex grew into the horrors of toddlerhood, from talking to walking?

  The woman who had efficiently managed an entire research facility had retired to a domestic world, there to turn into a superb cook and an indefatigable housekeeper. But ever since Alex’s birth five months ago Desdemona had dwindled, not helped by Julian, a master of the filibuster, the harangue and the sermon.

  Okay, he thought, opening the front door, here goes! I am going to do my best to pull Desdemona back from the abyss.

  “It’s good to see you, but even better to feel you,” he said into her neck, crushing her in a rather frantic embrace. Then he kissed her, keeping his lips tender.

  Understanding that this was no overture to passion, Desdemona put her husband into a chair and gave him his pre-dinner drink.

  “Julian’s in bed?” he asked.

  “Yes, you tricked him for once. He expected you to be on time, but when you didn’t turn up, he fell asleep.” She sighed. “He had a shocking tantrum today, right in the middle of Maria’s luncheon party. I told her I didn’t want to come!” A hot tear fell on to Carmine’s hand.

  “My mother is sometimes not very bright, Desdemona. So I take it our son spoiled things?”

  “He would have, except that Maria slapped him—hard! You know how I feel about slapping children, Carmine—there has to be a more effective way to deal with small children.”

  Sit on it, Carmine, sit on it! “If there is, my love, you don’t seem to have found it with Julian,” he said—reasonably, he thought. “Tantrums are a form of hysteria, the child takes no harm from being jerked out of it.”

  In the old days she would have flown at him, but not these days. Instead, she seemed to shrink. “It wore him out, at any rate. That’s why he’s in bed and asleep.”

  “Good. I can do with the peace and quiet.”

  “Were you serious when you threatened him with a nanny the other day? We can’t afford a nanny, Carmine, and a stranger in the house would make him worse.”

  “First off, woman, I manage our finances. You shouldn’t have that headache on top of two babies. We can afford it, and I didn’t threaten Julian. I was warning him. It’s going to happen, my dear love, though not for the reasons you think. Not for Julian—for you. You’re permanently down, Desdemona. When you think no one’s looking, you weep a lot, and you can’t seem to find your way out of whatever it is plagues you. I went to see Doc Santini this afternoon because every time I insist you see him, you race in and out of his surgery pretending it’s Julian or Alex is sick. Desdemona, honestly! If there’s one thing Doc Santini’s not, it’s a fool. He knows as well as I do that you’re the one who’s sick. He says you’re suffering from a post-partum depression, love.”

  She flung herself mutinously into her chair; when Carmine spoke in that tone, even God had to shut up and listen. And, she admitted as her anger died, there was something wrong with her. The trouble was, she knew it was incurable, whereas these men—what did men know about it?—thought it was physical.

  “Apparently they’re finding out a lot about women who become depressed after childbirth. It’s nothing Freudian, it’s a physical, hormonal thing that takes time and care to fix. You’ll have to see Doc tomorrow morning, and if you ignore me, wife, I’ll have you taken to the surgery under police escort. My mother is coming round to babysit—”

  “She’ll slap Julian!” Desdemona cried.

  “Happen he needs a slap. Just because your father beat you as a child, Desdemona, doesn’t make a slap for a transgression cruelty. Sometimes it’s plain common sense. And let’s not get on to Julian, let’s stay with you.”

  The tears were running silently down her face, but she was at least looking at him.

  “Doc doesn’t want to put you on drugs. You’re a borderline case and you’ll get better naturally if we ease the pressure. In the main, that’s Julian. And the answer for Julian isn’t a slap, I agree with you there because once a slap loses its shock value, he’ll ignore slaps. How am I doing so far?”

  “Spot on,” she said gruffly. “Oh, Carmine, I thought it was your work preying on you when you come home, but it’s me! Me! I am so sorry! Oh, what can I do? I’m such a burden!”

  “Desdemona, don’t cry! I’m giving you answers for your pain, not reasons. You could never be a burden. That’s a two-way street either of us could travel down. Doc suggested that I employ a young woman to help you. Her name is Prunella Balducci and she’s one of the East Holloman Balduccis, therefore some kind of cousin of mine. She usually works for megabucks on New York City’s upper east side. A couple of weeks ago she got tired of it and came home. Her savings account is loaded, so she isn’t interested in taking a megabucks job. What she wants is to be near her mom and dad for a while. Once she’s had a break, she’s heading for L.A. and a different set of emotional cripples than New York’s. By that, I mean that Prunella takes a job in an emotionally crippled household and gets its inhabitants organized enough for ordinary nannies and housekeepers.” He drew a long breath. “On my way home tonight I called in at Jake Balducci’s place and saw Prunella, who has agreed to come to us until Christmas. By then, she says, your troubles will only be a memory. We can afford what she’s asking in Holloman, Desdemona, so money is not an issue.”

  “I don’t—I can’t—”

  “Woman, of course you can! I am aware that you clean the house before Caroline comes, which is crazy, but you can’t do that with someone who’s staying here and eating meals with us and is really a part of the family, if only temporarily.”

  Desdemona gasped. “Staying here? Where? Which room? Oh, Carmine, I can’t!”

  “I also phoned my daughter at Paracelsus, ungrateful little puss that she is. Not a word to us in three weeks, but after I talked to her, I understood why, so she’s forgiven. She’s agreed to do her share toward your recovery by not coming home to sleep until Christmas. Prunella will live in Sophia’s tower. Caroline can clean it tomorrow, I’ve booked her for the day. Prunella is coming next week.”

  By this, Desdemona was sagging in her chair, winded. “I see you have it all sorted out,” she said stiffly.

  “Yes, wife, I do. Prunella’s chief task is to turn Julian into someone I look forward to seeing when I come home, rather than someone I could strangle for his treatment of you. At the moment he’s power crazy—bossy, manipulative and obnoxious, and if he goes on developing like that, the onl
y career he’ll be fit for is a defense attorney. And I tell you straight, Desdemona,” Carmine said, only half joking, “that I won’t have a son who gets axe murderers and pederasts off. I’d be happier with a son who lived on Welfare. There are traces of a nice person underneath Julian’s bluster, and now’s the time to make sure the nice person wins. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear, I hear,” she said, trying to smile. “Was it Shakespeare who said, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers!’? You are absolutely right, we can’t produce a defense attorney. In fact, even a D.A. would be unacceptable.”

  “Then is it settled?”

  “I suppose so. Yes, Prunella comes—but for Julian’s sake, not for mine.” Her face grew horrified. “What if I dislike her?”

  “You won’t. You’ll love her.”

  “Will she spank Julian?”

  “I think she has better ammunition in her arsenal than that, dear love. Try to move farther away from your own childhood and see Julian for what he is, not for what you were. He’s only half you. His other half is tough Italian-American.”

  She climbed to her feet, a long way. “Dinner,” she said.

  No matter what her mood, and even when the meal was, as tonight, a simple one of steak, French fries and salad, Desdemona was a superb cook. She sprinkled the outside of the meat with a special salt before broiling it, and her French fries were out of this world—crunchy on the outside, feathery inside.

  “Now,” she said after they were finished, “tell me how things went today, Carmine. I heard Delia on Luke Corby earlier.”

  “It’s too soon to know much about the Dodo—that’s what we decided to call him, though he prefers the Latin—Didus ineptus. Any idea why he’d think like that?”

  “Yes. He’s a poseur.”

  “Who got it wrong. The term was a Linnaeus classification, out of date now.”

  “I don’t think that bothers him. That particular phrase clicks with some idea in his mind. But the Dodo isn’t what’s worrying you,” she said, sipping her tea. She had persuaded Carmine to switch from coffee to tea after dinner, and he was sleeping better. “Tell me, love.”